r. Ward
made it clear to the House of Commons that the revenues of the State
Church in Ireland were not distributed with anything like a view to the
fair and equal remuneration of its clergy. In numbers of cases the
clergy of the higher ranks had enormous incomes, quite out of all
proportion to any duties they were even supposed to perform, while the
clergymen who actually did the work were, as a general rule, screwed
down to a pitiful rate of payment which hardly kept soul and body
together. Twenty pounds a year was not an uncommon stipend among the
curates who did the hard work, while an annual revenue of sixty pounds
was regarded as something like opulence. Where the curate received his
thirty {215} or forty pounds a year or less, the incumbent usually had
his two thousand a year, and in many instances much more. As we said
before, the incumbent deriving a rich revenue from his office was often
habitually an absentee, who left the whole of his work to be performed,
as best it might be done, by the curate, half starving on a miserable
pittance. Mr. Ward made out a case which must have produced some
impression on any Parliamentary assembly, and could hardly fail to find
attentive listeners and ready sympathy among the members of the first
reformed House of Commons.

[Sidenote: 1834--George Grote]

The motion was seconded by a remarkable man in a remarkable speech.
Mr. George Grote, afterwards famous as the historian of Greece, was one
of the new members of Parliament. He was a man of a peculiar type, of
an intellectual order which we do not usually associate with the
movement of the political world, but which is, nevertheless, seldom
without its representative in the House of Commons. Grote was one of
the small group of men who were, at that time, described as the
philosophical Radicals. He acknowledged the influence of Bentham; he
was a friend and associate of the elder and the younger Mill; he was a
banker by occupation, a scholar and an author by vocation; a member of
Parliament from a sense of duty. Grote, no doubt, was sometimes
mistaken in the political conclusions at which he arrived, but he
deserved the praise which Macaulay has justly given to Burke, that he
was always right in his point of view. With Grote a political measure
was right or wrong only as it helped or hindered the spread of
education, human happiness, and peace. He was one of the earliest and
most persevering advocates of the ballot